Her Hope
by SelahSardonica
Summary: When Claude falls in battle, Byleth is once again faced with the idea of loss.


**A/N:** this vomited from my brain after a sinful amount of time spent playing this game, reading other fanfics, and inhaling all the fanart I could find within the fandom. Take it or leave it, I wanted some good ol' fashioned angst with my favorite pairing.

* * *

HER HOPE

It'd happened again. She'd been too late.

There'd been so much blood, so much screaming. The healers had to forcebly move her before they could even reach him.

She'd tried, oh goddess had she tried to turn back time. But with her role in fate fulfilled, time had no reason to hear her. The tether Sothis had lent her for it was too far from her mortal reach now. For the first time, Byleth had been utterly powerless, and completely alone.

Byleth sat just outside Claude's tent, hands folded, head down, with eyes that stared at nothing. All was quiet now, but the sounds she'd heard from that tent in the last hour alone would haunt her sleep.

This wasn't new, one could reason. The King of Almyra been fallen in battle before, even gone missing in the fray because of it. That didn't make it any easier to stomach. That didn't change the fact Claude was dying. That didn't change the fact Byleth was having trouble breathing herself. He'd been the one to remind her that losing life, any life, was a tramendous loss. Even as a mercenary, even as a queen, and especially as a wife.

Byleth's hands ran up into her hair in attempts to self soothe. In attempts to get ahold of her own raging emotions. At a time of all times, like a ghost, her father's words haunted her thoughts.

_To think, the first time I saw you cry, your tears would be for me_.

Then as if to torture herself, without really thinking about it, she imagined Claude saying those words with his own dying breaths with his effortlessly charming smile, bordering truth and deceit as he always had. She had to put her head between her knees after that.

* * *

Hours felt like days before one of the healers finally came to her with news. Good news. He was stable, and she could go see him.

She ran. Her body screamed in protest from the lack of food and rest, but she ran. And she was by his side in what she swore were seconds.

Inside the tent, it reeked of medicinal herbs. Claude's bloodied clothes and armor were tossed in a pile in the corner. Byleth forced herself not to stare at them.

She looked to Claude instead. A third of his chest was covered in stained bandages. The rest of his skin was a sickly color, and the sleep he was getting still seemed troubled. She could relate.

Byleth took a breath and sat at Claude's bedside. Immediately she moved to feel for his pulse. Of course she could see his chest rise and fall, the sweat gathered at his brows, and hear his labored breaths, but — it was just Byleth's way of shutting down her thoughts. It was important, priority even, to be connected to what was happening to him. Even if it hurt every part of her to do so.

Some time passed, and she finally felt herself ralax. And thoughts suddenly became words, and for each that escaped, she let the feelings attached to them go.

"I never told you this, but, I can turn back time." She said with a humorless laugh, hearing how absurd it sounded. "Or, I used to be able to."

Her eyes drifted down. She took Claude's hand and held it with both of hers, her thumb rolling over his callouses, his scars. As if she were blind, and the bumps and ridges in his skin were the words that told his story. Before and after her.

Byleth's chest clinched again.

"I didn't tell you in the beginning because I didn't trust myself with it. I didn't want you to rely or plan around something so unpredictable. And, sure enough, it didn't work when I needed it the most." Her voice cracked, her throat trying to close as tears stung her eyes for the hundredth time that day. She was already sick of it. Sick of this. All of this.

"Claude..." She said, forcing conviction into her voice. "Your dream of a united world. We have to do it together. It didn't stop with Fodlan. It didn't stop with Almyra." She wiped at her face and clung to his hand. "It can't stop now. You have to know that." She bowed her head. "I do. With everything, everything that I am."

It could've been her wishful imagination, it could've been anything, but Byleth swore she felt her husband's pulse quicken then. And she would go on to always tell anyone that asked her about that night, that even in their darkest moments, Claude Von Riegan had always given her something to believe in.

He had always been her hope.


End file.
